Fire and Rain (9 page)

The album's launch was less than auspicious. In America, Capitol mounted a billboard of the album cover on Sunset Boulevard, but the record, released there in February 1969, didn't even make the charts. In the U.K., it sold only eight thousand copies. As quickly as it began, Taylor's career was in danger of running off the rails. Taylor was frustrated that
Apple seemed to ignore the album, just as it did with too many other Apple releases that didn't have the word “Beatle” on the cover. When Taylor went to London in the summer of 1969 to begin recording a follow-up, no one at the label was organized enough to book studio time. Asher too was frustrated: Although he'd been given enormous freedom to sign up new talent, Apple didn't seem to know how to promote most of it.

Taylor himself wasn't completely satisfied with the record. “It took months to make, and it was catch-as-catch-can,” he said. “It seems so half-baked, like I didn't have enough focus to bring the songs home the way I wanted them to be.” The reason for the fuzziness was again chemical. In London, Taylor's addiction returned; he was able to buy heroin from legal junkies who were registered users with London's maintenance treatment program. As a result, Taylor found himself unraveling once more. “Again, I found people to hang out with who were also getting in trouble and had bad habits,” he recalled, “and I ended up with another habit and sorta crashed and burned.” In the summer, he flew back to the States, wearing a velvet suit he'd worn to the premiere of the Beatles' movie
Yellow Submarine
the previous summer. (He was such a part of the Apple family that company tailors had made the suit especially for him.) Suspicious of his looks, airport officials strip-searched him, which didn't relieve his fragile state of mind.

For Asher, Apple changed dramatically after the arrival of Allen Klein, and he resigned soon after Taylor's album was out. He briefly landed a job at MGM Records in New York, but when the head of the label was fired, various employees, including Asher, were let go. No matter. Asher already had a new idea: He wanted to manage Taylor and produce his next album for a new record company. When Asher decided to talk to Taylor about his plan, he found himself heading for the Austin Riggs Center, a psychiatric hospital in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Taylor had committed himself once more, this time to a different hospital.

Asher flew to Boston and planned to drive to Austin Riggs. There was
only one problem: Asher didn't have a credit card to pay for a rental car. He told the car rental employees he was visiting a local client on business, and the company said it would approve the rental if a nearby resident would vouch for him. Asher did the only thing he could—he called Taylor at Austin Riggs. “He was probably on Thorazine or something,” Asher recalled. “He was no doubt brought to the phone by a whitecoated attendant.” Though addled, Taylor backed up Asher's story, and Asher was able to rent a car. As Asher had already discovered, Taylor was neither a typical client nor a standard potential pop star.

After he'd checked out of Austin Riggs, Taylor, at Asher's instigation, began performing. It was already apparent to those around him that playing in front of crowds fulfilled something in him, what his brother Livingston would describe as “a deep personal need to connect to an audience, to speak with them and to tell them he loves them and hear from them that they love
him
.” He was well received during his afternoon set at the Newport Folk Festival, where he later met Warner's Joe Smith. At other showcases, he played so softly that audiences talked through his set or thought he was merely the opening act. Whatever the situation, Taylor went along with few complaints. “Perhaps because of McLean, I got used to not having any expectations about what would happen—or even that I would
have
a future,” he recalled. “I went in the loosest sort of way from one situation to another, without any strategy.”

Asher, though, adhered to his original idea. He already knew about Warner Brothers and its sister label Reprise; any label home to singersongwriters like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot, and hyped with Stan Cornyn's hip ad copy, felt like a good fit for Taylor. Asher called Smith, and over breakfast at the Hyatt House hotel in Los Angeles in October 1969, the two talked business. Their goals were mutual;
Taylor wanted out of Apple, and Smith, who wanted in on Taylor's career, offered a modest $20,000 advance and a recording budget of the same amount for the first album. (Stock options in Warner Brothers were also on the table.) The Grateful Dead had received a slightly bigger advance from the label—$25,000—but Asher was nonetheless happy. As an added incentive, Asher made Smith agree to indemnify him and Taylor, since Asher suspected Apple might sue Taylor if he left his contract a year early. Smith agreed (the other Beatles eventually went along with McCartney's request to release Taylor from his Apple obligations), and they had a deal.

After Taylor arrived in Los Angeles that December, his motorcycle injuries healed, he moved in with Asher and Betsy at their spacious, Spanish-style rental at 956 Longwood Avenue, on the corner of Olympic Boulevard. The location wasn't ideal for a sensitive artist—public buses loudly rumbled by on Olympic, shaking parts of the house—but the spacious living room, complete with sun pouring through the windows, was a perfect rehearsal space. Asher began assembling a band to back Taylor. Kortchmar, who'd already moved to Los Angeles, was called in, along with Carole King, who'd met Taylor during his Flying Machine days in New York four years earlier. To her, he was “the tall one with the guitar,” but otherwise she hadn't remembered that much about him.

King herself was starting over. After writing a string of hits with her husband, Gerry Goffin—“Will You Love Me Tomorrow” for the Shirelles, “The Loco-Motion” for Little Eva, “One Fine Day” for the Chiffons, “Up on the Roof” for the Drifters, and so many other songs that defined pop radio in the first half of the '60s—King had separated from Goffin and relocated with their two children to Laurel Canyon in 1967. She and Taylor became reacquainted when Taylor visited L.A. to promote the Apple album early in 1969, and he ended up jamming with her, Kootch, and Joel O'Brien, who'd formed a band called the City. Taylor was so self-effacing that King was pleasantly surprised by the quality
of his guitar work; for a folkie type, he played so dexterously and intricately that his guitar sounded like a bell. Asher had overheard Taylor and King playing guitar and piano together and thought King would make an ideal accompanist for Taylor's second album.

At a recording session for former Kingston Trio member John Stewart, Asher had heard Kunkel, who'd logged time in a local band, Things to Come. Asher now had a skeletal band, all of whom gathered in Asher's living room to practice in early December. The room was so devoid of furniture, the acoustics so loud, and Taylor's approach so muted that Kunkel, who was accustomed to playing rock and roll, resorted to brushes instead of sticks for his drum kit. He didn't want to overpower the tall, quiet guy at the center. “Everyone had to walk on eggshells in order to get the dynamics to work,” Kortchmar recalled. “James was a very quiet singer.”

During the making of
James Taylor,
Asher had noticed Taylor disappearing into the lavatory for long stretches and looking tired. At the time, he wasn't aware of Taylor's drug history. Asher knew all about it now, but he noticed Taylor was far more focused. With Taylor's passel of new songs—including one called “Sunny Skies,” written, ironically, at Austin Riggs—the musicians, augmented by several different bass players, shifted to Sunset Sound. Starting December 8, they methodically began working their way through the material.

From the start, Kunkel saw Taylor as more than just another sulky folkie: “James could go from completely sober to completely silly in the snap of a finger,” he recalled. So it was at the sessions. Taylor's sense of humor emerged when he and Kortchmar sat down at the end of one night and, with just their two guitars, knocked out a blues parody, “Oh Baby, Don't You Loose Your Lip on Me.” During the Flying Machine days in the Village, Taylor had heard one too many pretentious white blues bands and wrote “Steamroller” to mock them. Again, he and Kortchmar laid it down in one night, Taylor singing intentionally exaggerated
metaphors to the accompaniment of their two electric guitars. (A rhythm section and horns were added later.) Both the schedule and the funds were so tight that when Taylor showed up with a head cold, they had no choice but to record the song anyway; his congestion could be heard in the final take.

Taylor had begun writing another new song, “Fire and Rain,” in London, under less than pleasant circumstances. During the making of
James Taylor,
a friend from McLean and the Manhattan druggy period, Susan Schnerr, had intentionally overdosed on pills. “We had never been that tight, but I really liked her,” Taylor recalled. Afraid of upsetting him or distracting him from his work, friends like O'Brien kept the news from Taylor for months. When he finally heard, Taylor was shaken and started sketching out the first verse in his London apartment. “It just found its way into the first verse of the song,” he recalled. “It was easy to write.” The second verse, which came later, detailed his heroin problems and methadone treatment and was written in a New York psychiatric ward he'd checked into just before committing full-time to Austin Riggs. The third verse, with its references to “sweet dreams and Flying Machines in pieces on the ground,” detailed his breakdown just before and after his short-lived band.

Taylor had written overcast songs before, but “Fire and Rain” took that intensity to a new, almost frighteningly stark level—and, ironically, was greeted by his friends as a potential breakthrough. “When I played it for Joel O'Brien, he said, ‘You know, that could be a very commercial, big song for you,'” Taylor recalled. “Peter thought that, too.” In Los Angeles in January 1969, Taylor, Kortchmar, and bass player Charles Larkey, King's boyfriend and new collaborator, put an early version of the song on tape, but it didn't feel right. Back in Los Angeles almost a year later, they tried again and cut it, efficiently, on December 9. Initially Kunkel played his part with drumsticks, until Asher, recalling their rehearsals, suggested the softer, swishier sound of brushes. The revised
rhythm became a signature part of the arrangement, an emotional sputter and touch of drama at the end of each chorus. Meanwhile, King added spare piano chords, as if tiptoeing around Taylor's melancholy.

At the end of the third day, Taylor told Asher that was it. Even though they'd only recorded nine songs, he didn't have any more. “Well, we should really finish this and deliver it and get it down and get the money,” Asher told him. The two came up with an idea to combine three half-finished songs into a brand-new one. Everyone returned to Sunset Sound on December 17 and quickly cut “Suite for 20G,” named in honor of the amount of money they'd receive once they handed in the completed album. “Twenty thousand dollars was a lot of money back then,” Kunkel recalled. “It meant Peter could buy some furniture.” Adding up the costs of studio time and musicians, Asher realized they'd spent $7,600 recording the entire album. He was so green he felt he'd be in trouble with Smith for not spending enough of the label's money.

Taylor was pleased with the results but unsure of where the record might take him. “We were just making another record,” Taylor recalled. “We were better at it. Peter was a better producer. We had a more focused idea and the players on it were good. We were in Los Angeles in a professional recording studio doing professional work. It's always good to make an album quickly and in a concise way, because it makes it have a cohesion and makes it hang together in a natural way. But I had no idea if it was any good or not.”

Everyone, including Taylor, agreed on one thing: The cover was striking. Four days before the “Suite for 20G” session, Henry Diltz—an affable thirty-one-year-old photographer and folk musician who'd taken the photo used for the iconic cover of
Crosby, Stills & Nash
—had arrived at Asher's Longwood Avenue home. Sitting on the living-room floor beneath a large window, his back against the wall and his legs spread out before him, Taylor sat quietly, picking out the notes of Stephen Foster's “Oh, Susannah” on guitar. He, Diltz, and Asher then drove out to an isolated
farm off Bonham Boulevard in the Lake Hollywood section and veered down a dirt road, finally arriving at a hippie commune in the woods. Given how unvarnished Taylor's music was, the sheds and barns in sight felt like the right setting.

Diltz snapped away as Taylor, in a blue denim work shirt, walked around the property. At one point, he leaned against a post and stared straight ahead. Frowning beneath a King Arthur shag and a stoic, Gary Cooper-as-folksinger gaze, he suddenly looked like a star. “Hold that a minute,” Diltz said, grabbing his color camera to snap off a few frames. Diltz hadn't intended the color shots to be for more than a slide show for friends, but after developing the shot, he saw its potential.